So I set myself the task of picking five great works of software. The criteria were simple: How long had it been around? Did people directly interact with it every day? Did people use it to do something meaningful? I came up with the office suite Microsoft Office, the image editor Photoshop, the videogame Pac-Man, the operating system Unix, and the text editor Emacs.

Each person has his or her own criteria for these sorts of things, but in my view, this list is woefully inadequate. If it were up to me, I would pick these, in no particular order:

WorldWideWeb/CERN HTTPd: the first web browser and the first web server, both written by Tim Berners-Lee. Also a given.

Xerox Star: this one is actually a tie between the Star, its research predecessor the Alto, and Douglas Engelbart's NLS. These three combined still define the way we do computing today - whether you look at a desktop, a smartphone, or a tablet. I decided to go with the Star because it was the only one of the three that was commercially available, and because it's so incredibly similar to what we still use today.

Windows: you cannot have a list of the greatest software of all time without Windows. You may not like it, you may even hate it, but the impact Windows has had on the computing world - and far, far beyond that - is immense. Not including it is a huge disservice to the operating system that put a computer on every desk, in every home.

This leaves a whole bunch of others out, such as Lotus 1-2-3, DOS, the Mac OS, Linux, and god knows what else - but such is the nature of lists like this.

To be honest, I would've left Windows out of there and brought the NLS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_%28computer_system%29 ) to the table instead. Windows didn't really bring anything new to the scene, it merely collected many already-done ideas and designs to the same OS. The NLS, though, did much, much more, and the full list of computer-scene firsts is quite hefty:

Well, you do say you picked Star over NLS in the list. I am saying you should've picked both and left Windows out of it. I don't intend to start a fight about it, I am merely expressing my view that both NLS and Star were enormously important to software-technological progression and Windows was much less so.

One thing that Microsoft did and which was extremely important was help break IBM's stranglehold on the PC-market, but I attribute that more to Microsoft's marketing and business tactics than to their software itself.